Help! Our Teachers Are Burned Out
By Chris Marvel Davis
Walk into any classroom across America, and something overtakes you. The feeling of occupying one of those narrow chairs, just a bit smaller than a seat on a Frontier Airlines flight. The smell of air that hasn’t been circulated and desk that Weebles and wobbles left to right.
Another point to acknowledge during your stroll is the tense nature of the school. The lack of smiles spread among the faculty, janitors, and librarians. School is where the joyous children arrive to be educated and taught by the best teachers.
41% of those teachers will leave the profession within the first five years.
We can cite many reasons teachers may want to disengage from the profession.
Concerns about COVID, low wages, lack of work-life balance, poor leadership, mental health, and bureaucracy are getting in the way.
These are valid reasons and have been cited numerous times in various articles.
When you combine those elements above, you typically will get a teacher who is possibly lacking burnout prevention skills and has suffered from secondary trauma — burnout, which means the exhaustion of emotional and mental resources for the task needed. Secondary trauma lays out similar to PTSD, except it is experienced vicariously (vicarious trauma is another name) by the student’s teacher’s guide daily.
Teachers are in a mental health crisis and need help.
A new study from the University of Washington shows that the rate of job burnout among teachers is rising, with one in three teachers surveyed reporting high levels of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, which are strongly linked to symptoms of depression and anxiety.
The study also found that teachers who experience these symptoms of burnout, are less likely to seek help because they feel they need to “tough it out.”
Burnout is common among professionals who deal with heavy workloads, long hours, and emotionally demanding work. But as the teaching profession becomes increasingly stressful due to larger class sizes and scope of responsibility, educators may be particularly vulnerable.
In addition to feeling overworked and underpaid, teachers often feel disrespected by administrators and parents who do not understand their role in educating children. This lack of respect makes many teachers feel isolated from their colleagues and the communities they serve.
These factors and low pay have contributed to an alarming increase in teacher attrition and signs of burnout over the past few years. In New York City alone, more than 1,500 teachers left their jobs between 2016 and 2017 due to burnout or physical and mental dissatisfaction with working conditions at their schools.
Faculty are involved in students’ daily lives as though they were social workers in some districts. Advocating for housing, ensuring food is available, creating safety inside and outside the school, and much more.
Can you imagine creating a curriculum for your class and fighting through traffic to teach that lesson at your school? Before the bell rings, a fight broke out on the bus, and you are trying to help the student contact their parent. As the day goes on, you constantly remind students about your class’s cell phone policy. Around noon you find out there is a staff meeting for the second week. You have to cancel your plans for the evening suddenly. Students are nodding off at their desks as the day is coming to an end. You wonder if you are still good at your job. Are you the teacher they need, or should you find another profession? The children start arguing, hurling profanity back and forth across the room like a Spalding leather football. You realize you have nothing left to say at this point. No long-drawn-out lesson about respect and no second chances. You ask both students to leave the class. You are burned out. You feel isolated, and wonder does leadership even care about how you feel. The love to teach was there, and sometimes after a three-day weekend or a holiday break, you feel a surge to be all you can be. But you are no soldier; you are a teacher.
We can help our educators more than we do today with preventing burnout and encouraging more control over their work. Schools and companies spend billions on professional development each year. Much of it focused on curriculum strategy and SEL (socio-emotional learning), but not much is spent on educators. Some of the issues are based on funding sources and who has so say in how it’s utilized. When it comes to the government, whether federal or state, most of the PDs are directed by someone else outside the district. Schools need more autonomy to guide their educators. Educators also need more control in managing their development, seeing that only 7 percent of teachers choose whether they can participate in the available PD.
When I started helping educators with mental health through a company I co-founded with my wife, Pivot Training and Development. We understood the need to be different. No yoga or manicures here.
When our team hosts a workshop, we dispense SEL-built journals for the educators — a daily guide to harnessing one’s favorable and unfavorable emotions in their life. We discuss the importance of adult play and how it provides rest from feeling tired and a positive engagement. We dive deep into the definition of burnout and how each teacher can create boundaries in their workspace with leadership and co-workers to avoid burnout in the near future..
When we speak, our passion comes alive, which educators need. Not money spent on itemized training, but someone to reinvigorate their love for their craft. Jeremy Anderson, arguably the top motivational speaker in the world in education, says it’s about the heart work and giving value to those in education. If you have ever seen a Jeremy Anderson video, you know his motivation gives teachers a boost.
Our schools are in a crisis, and it starts in the classroom. We could talk about how digital devices have harmed student attention spans and created elements of misbehavior. But we have to address how we care for those who care for our children.
Teachers are leaving careers, costing the district and the community each time. Let our teachers have a voice in how they receive help before there are no voices left to teach.
Stress can certainly cause burnout, but stress isn’t synonymous with burnout. You feel stressed when things seem too hard to handle because you’ve already been asked to do something so intensely difficult both for yourself and for yourself. During a stressful period you need to control all of your worries.
What does preventing burnout mean?
Burning out is feeling tired and unmotivated without feeling the need to care. People experiencing burnout rarely see an opportunity to improve their situation. When you experience excess stress and feel like you are drowning under your responsibilities, burnout means that you feel exhausted.
Stress helps a person feel better when they have everything in control. Burnout can leave you feeling unmotivated or irritable. Excessive stress is like drowning and burns out,” Schiff said.
Walk into any classroom across America, and something overtakes you. The feeling of occupying one of those narrow chairs, just a bit smaller than a seat on a Frontier Airlines flight. The smell of air that hasn’t been circulated and desk that Weebles and wobbles left to right.
Another point to acknowledge during your stroll is the tense nature of the school. The lack of smiles spread among the faculty, janitors, and librarians. School is where the joyous children arrive to be educated and taught by the best teachers.
41% of those teachers will leave the profession within the first five years.
We can cite many reasons teachers may want to disengage from the profession.
Concerns about COVID, low wages, lack of work-life balance, poor leadership, mental health, and bureaucracy are getting in the way.
These are valid reasons and have been cited numerous times in various articles.
When you combine those elements above, you typically will get a teacher who is possibly lacking burnout prevention skills and has suffered from secondary trauma — burnout, which means the exhaustion of emotional and mental resources for the task needed. Secondary trauma lays out similar to PTSD, except it is experienced vicariously (vicarious trauma is another name) by the student’s teacher’s guide daily.
Teachers are in a mental health crisis and need help.
A new study from the University of Washington shows that the rate of job burnout among teachers is rising, with one in three teachers surveyed reporting high levels of emotional exhaustion and depersonalization, which are strongly linked to symptoms of depression and anxiety.
The study also found that teachers who experience these symptoms of burnout, are less likely to seek help because they feel they need to “tough it out.”
Burnout is common among professionals who deal with heavy workloads, long hours, and emotionally demanding work. But as the teaching profession becomes increasingly stressful due to larger class sizes and scope of responsibility, educators may be particularly vulnerable.
In addition to feeling overworked and underpaid, teachers often feel disrespected by administrators and parents who do not understand their role in educating children. This lack of respect makes many teachers feel isolated from their colleagues and the communities they serve.
These factors and low pay have contributed to an alarming increase in teacher attrition and signs of burnout over the past few years. In New York City alone, more than 1,500 teachers left their jobs between 2016 and 2017 due to burnout or physical and mental dissatisfaction with working conditions at their schools.
Faculty are involved in students’ daily lives as though they were social workers in some districts. Advocating for housing, ensuring food is available, creating safety inside and outside the school, and much more.
Can you imagine creating a curriculum for your class and fighting through traffic to teach that lesson at your school? Before the bell rings, a fight broke out on the bus, and you are trying to help the student contact their parent. As the day goes on, you constantly remind students about your class’s cell phone policy. Around noon you find out there is a staff meeting for the second week. You have to cancel your plans for the evening suddenly. Students are nodding off at their desks as the day is coming to an end. You wonder if you are still good at your job. Are you the teacher they need, or should you find another profession? The children start arguing, hurling profanity back and forth across the room like a Spalding leather football. You realize you have nothing left to say at this point. No long-drawn-out lesson about respect and no second chances. You ask both students to leave the class. You are burned out. You feel isolated, and wonder does leadership even care about how you feel. The love to teach was there, and sometimes after a three-day weekend or a holiday break, you feel a surge to be all you can be. But you are no soldier; you are a teacher.
We can help our educators more than we do today with preventing burnout and encouraging more control over their work. Schools and companies spend billions on professional development each year. Much of it focused on curriculum strategy and SEL (socio-emotional learning), but not much is spent on educators. Some of the issues are based on funding sources and who has so say in how it’s utilized. When it comes to the government, whether federal or state, most of the PDs are directed by someone else outside the district. Schools need more autonomy to guide their educators. Educators also need more control in managing their development, seeing that only 7 percent of teachers choose whether they can participate in the available PD.
When I started helping educators with mental health through a company I co-founded with my wife, Pivot Training and Development. We understood the need to be different. No yoga or manicures here.
When our team hosts a workshop, we dispense SEL-built journals for the educators — a daily guide to harnessing one’s favorable and unfavorable emotions in their life. We discuss the importance of adult play and how it provides rest from feeling tired and a positive engagement. We dive deep into the definition of burnout and how each teacher can create boundaries in their workspace with leadership and co-workers to avoid burnout in the near future..
When we speak, our passion comes alive, which educators need. Not money spent on itemized training, but someone to reinvigorate their love for their craft. Jeremy Anderson, arguably the top motivational speaker in the world in education, says it’s about the heart work and giving value to those in education. If you have ever seen a Jeremy Anderson video, you know his motivation gives teachers a boost.
Our schools are in a crisis, and it starts in the classroom. We could talk about how digital devices have harmed student attention spans and created elements of misbehavior. But we have to address how we care for those who care for our children.
Teachers are leaving careers, costing the district and the community each time. Let our teachers have a voice in how they receive help before there are no voices left to teach.
Ref
1.Zamarro, G., Camp, A., Fuchsman, D. and McGee, J., 2022. Understanding how COVID-19 has Changed Teachers’ Chances of Remaining in the Classroom. [online] Slu.edu. Available at: <https://www.slu.edu/research/sinquefield-center-for-applied-economic-research/working-paper-22-01-covid-changed-teachers-01.pdf> [Accessed 4 August 2022].
2.Soeonline.american.edu. 2022. Addressing Teacher Burnout: Causes, Symptoms, and Strategies. [online] Available at: <https://soeonline.american.edu/blog/teacher-burnout> [Accessed 4 August 2022].
3.Friedman, Isaac. (1995). Student Behavior Patterns Contributing to Teacher Burnout. Journal of Educational Research — J EDUC RES. 88. 281–289. 10.1080/00220671.1995.9941312.
